Many of today's entertainment or communication-related electronic user devices rely on receiving, transmitting, and/or using streaming digital data or content. Adaptive bit rate streaming is a technique for streaming digital data (particularly, multimedia content) over digital networks. Adaptive bit rate streaming may include detecting a bandwidth capacity and central processing unit (CPU) capacity of the user device in real time and adjusting the quality of a video stream accordingly to allow continuous streaming with a highest quality stream of the different bit rate streams corresponding to a current bandwidth capacity and CPU capacity of the user device.
In some implementations, a streaming client of a user device may access a manifest file (also referred to as a variant playlist file) that identifies different streams of an identical piece of content available for download at differing bit rates. The streaming client may also access index files that identify segments of the streams, and the order in which the segments are to be played. In some instances, when starting streaming of content, the streaming client requests segments from the lowest bit rate stream from a streaming server.